As regards Mains Electricity Outages, I am not attempting to mitigate against these. They are rare and usually short lived. Although as the country increases the proportion of power generated by wind and solar relative to gas and nuclear, the risk of outages increases. I couldn't install a UPS able to support enough equipment to remain online for a significant period - the practicable maximum might be around an hour. I don't feel that would be money well spent.
I'm thinking of broadband outages which could last for days. Very recently I had my analogue (not DV) telephone service go down at Friday lunchtime on July 18. Luckily the FTTC broadband remained working perfectly so I could report the fault over Live Chat the following Saturday morning. It was obvious that the fault almost certainly lay between the exchange and the street cabinet yet the call handler insisted they needed to send an engineer to my flat and the earliest they could manage was the afternoon of Wednesday July 23. So a five day outage.
On the morning of July 23 my landline phone rang unexpectedly. It was an engineer calling from the exchange - he had to go there anyway so had a look at my line. He was remarkably candid and explained that there was a team of engineers going round the exchanges "doing things" and one such team had been in my exchange the previous Friday. It looked as if one of them had been somewhat overzealous in their disconnections. He'd reconnected me and there would be no need for him to come to my flat.
So, a five day outage and it's far from the first time it's happened. Ironically I had been bombarded with mailshots from BT starting in April saying I would be switched to DV "within four weeks". Had that happened then quite likely this fault would not have occurred.
Had I lost broadband as well then I'm not sure what I could have done. I initially had tried to report the fault by ringing the 0800 800 150 number using a mobile. After a wait I got through to an automated system. That said that they would send my mobile a text explaining exactly how to proceed.
The text came through OK. Just one snag. My mobile is one of those neat little flip phones using the 2G network. And the text message contained a couple of Web URLs for me to login to proceed with the fault report. Not possible without a Smartphone. I suppose I will have to buy one at some point but ...
Now a broadband outage of 5 days would be quite serious. I've tried not to be too dependent on the internet but I've had to go with the flow. Things like Tax Returns and Payments which attract fines if late are very hard now to do by post the old way. I don't do full online banking but the pressure is there.
My FTTC copper segment is routed underground so may be less vulnerable than an above ground fibre cable. But it could still fail, or the fibre to the street cabinet could fail. And if my recent experience with the analogue phone is typical then BT may take days to fix it, perhaps even weeks. It's not very likely but it could happen.
This is why I feel that the Hybrid Connect is worthy of consideration. As are some of the other solutions posted by others here.
